


Wolves in the Walls

by UrbanAmazon



Category: The Bourne Legacy (2012)
Genre: Angst, Constellations, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 21:22:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5471240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UrbanAmazon/pseuds/UrbanAmazon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bad dreams, coping mechanisms, and stargazing (and other things that happen a week after running for your life in Manila).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wolves in the Walls

**Author's Note:**

  * For [andibeth82](https://archiveofourown.org/users/andibeth82/gifts).



Aaron dreamed of wolves.

Once upon a time, the worst thing he could have seen when he closed his eyes was a mirror.  The cognitive degrade started in the eyes, or so he dreamed, like a knife’s blade going cloudy from frost.  He would watch it creep outward from his eyes, softening, slacking, senses still clear but thoughts piling up like plaque in an artery.  He’d watch that line gather and deepen just above his brows as his uninhibited and amplified physical input brought only confusion, possibly even panic.  Sounds throbbed in his teeth, his heartbeat resonated like gong strikes to his bones, his skin ached with the very pressure of the air.  It hurt, trying to count and make sense of sensations one at a time, but he would watch his reflection try, and try, tear at his hair and claw at his skin to make everything go in some semblance of order, and try--

Until he stopped.  Until the face in the mirror would go slack and relaxed, and not care about the shadows drawing close.

Those were the nightmares Aaron left behind.  Bad dreams ( _like unarmed bodies motionless in the street, like the smell of gunpowder and improvised explosive, like the choke of fever sweat_ ) still came and went on the whim of chemistry that he would never, ever have a handle on, but they all evaporated with the dawn.  They were only memories, done and gone, and couldn’t hurt him.  

Now, even cognitive degrade was less than a memory, an ‘if’ become a ‘never’.  

That left him the wolves, and the way their eyes glinted with firelight as they ghosted through silent snowfall.  Aaron didn’t feel afraid.  The mountain cold seeped into his bones as he breathed, and the howling of the pack surrounded him from all sides, but he was never afraid. It was oddly comforting, like the click of slotting a knife home.

Not even when the wolves tore him down, down, down like that elk… down on that mountainside where no asset, no agent, no handler would ever find him, ever again.  

Whether that made them nightmares or not, or even bad dreams, he still wasn’t sure.  

Aaron opened his eyes; heartbeat steady, breathing steady, lying flat on the bed with the infinite zigzag pattern of the woven ceiling above.  The humidity made everything heavier with the heat, but he could still feel without looking that Marta’s weight was gone from the mattress at his side.  She’d tugged the sheet back over the space and placed the small neck pillow just right, as if that might keep him from being undisturbed ( _as if his skin didn’t hum when she was near, reassuring white noise on an electrochemical level, she’d probably give him a lecture on the science of it if he asked_ ).  

If he relaxed his eyes just so, Marta’s silhouette took shape in the dark beside the beach hut’s open window.  The sky was still dark, but the faintest hint of purple in the east was enough to see her profile.  _Alpha lupi,_  her lips spelled, soundless against the nearby surf.  Her eyes squinted slightly, starlight catching on eyelashes and stress lines.  _Beta lupi... gamma...._   

He pulled himself up, still a little careful for his leg.  Physical augmentation and regular dips in the ocean had left only a dark pink circle of a scar high on his thigh, but the muscle beneath had another few days of mending.  The road rash on his hip was nearly gone.  

Marta was not so lucky, and the loose shirt she wore was as much for that as it was for the heat.  The scuffs on her elbows and shoulder were pebbled with dark scabs, and the sides of her legs still bore the hatch-marked bruises from where she’d slid with only denim for protection.  She didn’t limp at all, but holding still for long stretches on the boat made her wince when she stretched her legs, or even shifted her weight.  Not that a word of complaint ever left her lips, not once ( _and he worried about that, worried about her and what she didn’t say when he was the only one to listen_ ).

Aaron dragged his foot against the mattress to let her know he was awake; she flinched as if it had been a distant gunshot.  In the space of a breath, she was out of the chair and put her back toward the wall, the corner.  For a moment, Aaron was still asleep, still in the forest and the quiet, and Marta’s wolf eyes watched him from the dark beyond his campfire.  He blinked, and it faded.

“Hey.  Hey.”  He lifted both hands, palms out to catch the thin offerings of light.  His hands were empty ( _empty this time, but she’d still bared her teeth and pulled the empty trigger that first time_ ) and unthreatening; the gun was already empty by the time it skittered off the Manila docks with half of the motorcycle’s fender, and the knife he’d bartered from a fisherman was tucked under the mattress, not the pillow.  “Marta.  It’s me.  It’s okay.  Just me.”

He felt more than saw the relaxation in her shoulders.  “Sorry,” she breathed, voice tight.  

“It’s okay.  Nightmare?”

“I… yes.  I was just surprised, is all.  Surprised it took this long to have one.”

Pressing for details felt as rude as it was unnecessary.  Maybe she’d dreamed about pebbled glass raining to the floor under dull fluorescent lights, or the crunch of snapping neck vertebrae.  Perhaps it had been the scent of sterile lab tools and gunsmoke, or gasoline and fire, licking at the autumn leaves.  Aaron was not about to be so ignorant as to think that his own immunity to memories was something she might pick up in a week ( _but she learned so fast, and he had his mind only because she was so brilliant, unaided_ ).

Still, there was more, hiding with her in the corner. He sat on the edge of the bed facing her, with his elbows on his knees and his shoulders slumped low and unthreatening.  “So you started naming the stars?”

Marta said nothing.  

“Better than counting sheep,” Aaron admitted. “But I don’t know, maybe you should cover all your bases. Can you see Aries from here?”  It was a silly, paper-thin joke, but he smiled when she smiled.   There was something bizarrely nostalgic about filling the space between them with words, chatter to kill time and make things less awkward or empty ( _to warm the cold examination table, to ignore the paper-thin gown, to let him savor the presence of a human being with kind hands before the sedatives took it all away_ ).  It was even better now that she could talk with him, too.

 _When_  she talked with him. The smile was a good sign, and Aaron’s breath came a little easier.

“I miss my sister,” Marta finally shared softly.  “I woke up, and… I tried reaching for the my phone to call her. My phone from home, I mean. It took me a few moments to remember I’m never going to see her again, and that’s worse than the nightmare.”  

Aaron’s smile faded.  The inside of his elbow itched, a phantom prickle of a needle.  It would be a risk (add it to the list), but they were hundreds of miles from Manila, on a deserted island in a sea of thousands, until the tourist boat circled back on this route in three days time.  It was as stable ground as they could ever hope for.  Just this once.  He owed her ( _over and over and more, he owed her for so much… but there was something else in the back of his head whenever he thought that, something more that pressed back and said it was wrong, wrong_ ).  

“Would you tell me about her?” Aaron asked.  

Marta looked up at him sharply, eyes wide as if she’d been expecting another gentle lecture about leaving that life behind.  

Aaron slipped down from the bed and settled down in front of Marta, legs crossed.  He was close enough to touch, but the corner was her shelter, her defensible point.  He let her keep it.   “What’s her name?” ( _he always asked too many questions_ )

Her chin trembled, then set.  “Evelyn.  Evie.”  There was no one else to hear it, no one on the beach for miles, but Marta still handled it like something that might be stolen.  Ever since she’d learned his name, Marta used it like she had to make up for all those impersonal interactions before.  _Aaron, Aaron, Aaron,_ shouted at the top of her lungs and and softly asking for his attention, the two syllables almost blurring together into one.  No one else had ever said it like that, either stretching it out to _Air-rawn_  like steps in a march or snapping _Cross_  with that hiss between their teeth.  She treated it like a name, and not like an empty sound waiting for thick black ink to censor it from a page.   

“She’s the older one.  By six years.  We’ve-” Marta laughed breathily, a glint of teeth, “-we’ve got less than nothing in common.  I caught earthworms, Evie won poetry contests.  I tried out for the badminton team, she had the lead in a stage musical.  She writes novels now, historical things.  I… I never bought one of her books, and she never gave me one.  We never competed for anything just because there was no playing field.  Everyone always assumes we didn’t get along.  

“But we did.  We talk for hours when we need it.  When we were little, whenever I had a nightmare about… about monsters under the bed, I always woke up and went to hide in Evie’s room.  She never turned me away.  She was never too big or too cool to help her little sister.  I don’t remember what I was dreaming--”

A little lie, as Aaron saw the way her hands went flat over her knees.

“--but it never mattered.  I could stay as long as I needed to.  She’d stay awake with me and tell me all sorts of stories to make the monsters go away.”  Marta sniffled but her eyes were dry.  “Now I can’t think of any of them.  A lifetime full of stories she told me, but I can’t reach into my head and just catch one.  I can’t even remember the last thing we--”  She laughed, that nervous, disbelieving laugh with a sad smile.  “I shouldn’t think about it anymore, I know.  The closest thing I could think of instead was the stars.”  

As the words slowly spilled out, the gentle wedge of daylight yawned its way across the floor and into the dark corner, spilling purple light across Marta’s toes, her knees, her laced fingers resting on top.  Purple became pink, a warm glow on the side of her cheekbone, on the shape of her nose and the tired circles under her eyes.  “June Monroe counts stars to go to sleep,” she sighed bitterly, “but she doesn’t know any of the southern constellations except the one.”  

"I thought you wanted to be lost."

"... it was a silly idea."  

Aaron frowned ( _guiltily_ ).  No more chemical compounds, or scientific processes.  No more comfort from those for her.  It would have been hypocritical to say it was anything but a loss ( _he owed her for everything-- no, stop. it was more, it was not something so impersonal as returning a favor_ ).  It stung how he’d been so afraid of an imaginary mirror, once, when Marta’s loss was still a raw wound and names meant so much.

She deserved better, whether he owed her or not.

He wouldn’t startle her again, but Aaron still kept his movements slow and relaxed.  He stood up from the bed and took a seat on the side of the corner that was losing the battle with the light.  There was still space between them if Marta wanted it, but he needed the angle.  “It's a start.  It's not like every constellation makes very much sense.”  Aaron pointed at another faint clump of stars lingering among the mix of purple and pink clouds.  “For your collection?  That’s part of the one called Antlia.  It’s supposed to be a water pump.”

"There's a constellation for _that?"_ Marta snorted.  “Astronomers.”

“They named one after a telescope too.  A bit too obvious, isn’t it?”

Marta smiled against her knees, then leaned a little closer to Aaron’s side ( _his nerves sang where they almost-touched, and that had nothing to do with what he owed her. good._ ).  “Antlia,” she repeated.  The bitterness had faded.  Her voice was still weary, but it was determined.  “What’s another one?”

"There's Alphard, the brightest star in Hydra.  The cluster off to the right is its head, and then it weaves back underneath Corvus and Spica...."

There wasn’t enough dark left in the sky to name them all, but he pointed out the components to the Southern Cross, Centaurus, and Crater for her to learn. By the time the horizon cracked and spilled molten sunlight over the water, Marta’s head had come to rest on Aaron’s shoulder. Warm, steady breaths leaned her weight against him. Her hair tickled his bicep as she breathed, and he smoothed a loose curl back behind her ear. Aaron braced his hand on his knee to cast a protective shadow over her closed eyes.

He stopped trying to pick out the stars of the lowest constellation still clinging to the sky in the face of dawn; he knew the shape of it as easily as breathing, filed into his head in case they had to navigate the maze of seas and straits by themselves.  The names of the individual stars came to him unbidden, moving his lips.  _Alpha lupi… Beta… Gamma…._

Lupus.  The wolf.

They were waiting for him again, warm at his side against the snow and the empty, empty mountain.

A good dream, then.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Yuletide! I was very happy to see this fandom on your request list, because I came out of this movie with a big love for Marta and Aaron as well. I felt that their relationship would take a little time and careful steps to develop (adrenaline makes strong bonds, but there has to come a crash). Marta has to deal with so much in such a short time, and I'd like to think Aaron would know better than to rush his attraction, letting her some space and time to re-make herself and find her new north.


End file.
